The boy, 16, is about to utter the word that will change his life. Like they say the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rainforest might nudge successive air currents that alter Pacific Northwest weather, the boy doesn’t yet know the ramifications. The word he is about to utter is chemistry. He’s going to study chemistry and will become a professor of chemistry and will not only nurture in young humans a better understanding of how their world is put together but will also apply his entrepreneurial zeal toward making our Portland a cleaner and more livable place.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The boy, 16, is Walter Stott, an eager, tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed go-getter from a distinguished Portland family down on its luck. It’s 1931. His dad had worked for a Portland bank, but the bank went broke and his stock holdings evaporated.
“My folks were not flush,” says Stott, now 91 years old. His body is failing him, but he still has those laser-quick blue eyes and a sixteen cylinder mind, amused at the flukey wonder of it all. He’ll tell it like it is. Was.
“After two years of high school at The Madeleine, they wanted to make it a girls’ school. So I went over to Columbia Prep. First day on the bus, I sat with some kid who asked me, ‘What are you going to take?’ I didn’t know. ‘Chemistry,’ I said, just the first thing I thought of. He said, ‘Father Davis teaches chemistry. Be sure to ask for Father Davis.’
“Now this was a dirty trick — heh, heh, heh — because there were two chemistry teachers, Charlie Lauer and Father Ernest Davis. Nobody wanted Father Davis. He was too hard. I got there and said I wanted Father Davis for chemistry, and the registrar looked at me like I had my head screwed on wrong.
“Oh, Father Davis was hard, all right. He scared the socks off most people. He’d sit at his desk and call you up to the board, your knees knocking. He’d bark ‘What’s the formula for that? What’s the equation for such and such a reaction?’ If you got it right, he’d keep firing until you got it wrong. ‘SIT DOWN!!!’ People were scared silly — heh, heh, heh — keeping low in their seats.
“On one test, I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I couldn’t remember my own name. Father Davis took a look at my paper and said, ‘Son, take this into the other room. Take your time.’ I got a hundred on it.
“Yes, a few of us got along with Father Davis. There were thirty of us in that class and only five of us finished. All the classes — at Columbia Prep and the college, too — were at West [now Waldschmidt] Hall. The facilities were good for a high school. On the third floor was the chemistry stockroom and a big lab for the high school and first year college students. Each of us had a desk, with storage space underneath it. We performed our own experiments. It wasn’t like one guy doing it while half a dozen others stood around and chewed gum and watched. One time Max Bocek was making picric acid, yellow — heh, heh, heh — and splashed it on his pants. His pants all but disappeared. We went scouting about for enough safety pins so he could go home on the bus.
“Aw, gosh, I haven’t thought of this in years.
“We had a chemistry team. There was competition. Somebody wrote an exam, and if you were the best in the city they’d give you a volumetric flask. A volumetric flask! Father Davis’s class got it about every year.
“Most of the professors were of the Holy Cross Order. We wondered what CSC means. Chicago Street Cleaners? Can’t Smoke Cigarettes? Which was bunk — heh, heh, heh — because some of them smoked like chimneys. Brother Vitale sat up on a podium, like on a throne, monitoring study hall. He liked to take a nip now and then and might doze off. One time kids pulled Brother Vitale’s steps away from the podium. He went to run down after something, and KER-PLOP. He never did find out who did it.
“I lived at home, on the west slope of Mt. Tabor. To get to school I’d walk four blocks down to catch the Hawthorne car, transfer at Grand Avenue to Broadway, and wait for the streetcar coming across the bridge from downtown. If I was lucky, I might catch a ride there with Baron Fitzpatrick. His chauffer drove Baron Fitzpatrick to school in a Pierce Arrow touring car. His dad was president of the Real Silk Hosiery Company, I’ll always remember that. But usually the trip took an hour and a half, maybe an hour if everything clicked.
“To help pay tuition, I became the salesman for all the ads in the school paper. They called me the demon ad manager. Later I took over the chemistry stockroom, filling reagent bottles and checking equipment in and out. I got to know Father Davis well. Out of the classroom environment, he was as pleasant as could be. He lived in Christie Hall with a parrot. He’d let that damn bird out of its cage. I was afraid it would come after me, but it just perched on the back of his chair.
“My first year of college, I took chemistry again. By then I was not so petrified. But the college offered only two years of chemistry at the time, so I was a math major. I was a bookworm, I guess you’d say. There were no girls. No distractions whatsoever. You could graduate magna cum laude, which means with large honors. In 1937 I graduated maxima cum laude, the highest average over four years. After college, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I breezed through those Civil Service exams and got an offer to teach school in Mist, Oregon. Then came an offer to teach in Anchorage, Alaska. I was talking it over with Father Davis and he said, ‘What’s wrong with staying here?’”